To Republicans, schadenfreude may be a favorite form of entertainment, but hurting people economically also serves a critical purpose. The more desperate people are to find work, the more likely they will be to accept any work at any wages under any conditions. Kick them while they are down, and try to make them beg. Being able to disparage and demonize them is an added bonus.
Jesus worked, lived, and traded in the world as he found it. He was not an economic reformer, although he did frequently call attention to the injustice of the unequal distribution of wealth. But he did not offer any suggestions by way of remedy. He made it plain to the three that, while his apostles were not to hold property, he was not preaching against wealth and property, merely its unequal and unfair distribution. He recognized the need for social justice and industrial fairness, but he offered no rules for their attainment. —The Urantia Book
The cleansing of the temple discloses the Master’s attitude toward commercializing the practices of religion as well as his detestation of all forms of unfairness and profiteering at the expense of the poor and the unlearned. This episode also demonstrates that Jesus did not look with approval upon the refusal to employ force to protect the majority of any given human group against the unfair and enslaving practices of unjust minorities who may be able to entrench themselves behind political, financial, or ecclesiastical power. Shrewd, wicked, and designing men are not to be permitted to organize themselves for the exploitation and oppression of those who, because of their idealism, are not disposed to resort to force for self-protection or for the furtherance of their laudable life projects.
—The Urantia Book
The flagship burger of McDonaldland is the Big Mac, shown above with a list of its ingredients supplied by McDonalds. McDONALDLAND — Refusing to answer questions about Mayor McCheese‘s crack cocaine use, McLisa McComb, a spokeswoman for McDonald’s USA, announced the demise of the online presence of the McResource program, following the solicited appearance on their McWebsite of “unnecessary McViews …
Senator Ted Cruz walked out of the Mens Congressional restroom Friday, talking to a levitating ballpark frank.
Ted Cruz Chats With His Lunch in the Congressional Men’s Room
WASHINGTON— A partially dressed and apparently deranged Senator Ted Cruz (®Texas), emerged from the Congressional Men’s room Friday, alternately sobbing and talking coherently with an apparently invisible sausage or hot dog, which he claimed was hovering just above his head in front of him.
The Senator, who was shirtless and covered with dark paw marks of some sort was met outside the restroom by a phalanx of Capital Hill reporters with recording devices and a few snickers.
When asked why he was sobbing, Cruz responded, “Look! Just look what they did to my sweet little dog, Teddy; Obamacare grilled my sweet little dog. Well, why doesn’t he try and say it to my dog’s face!”
“Um, where is your dog Teddy now, sir?” asked Fox News reporter, Ed Henry. “There— right there in the lights, just in front of me” replied Cruz, staring off to the ceiling. The senator then made a series of little stroking motions, as if he were petting a dog; an uncomfortable silence was broken by the arrival of Capital Hill Security, who gingerly escorted the Senator from the room.
Cruz, who Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) recently said was “…a laughing stock to everybody but him,” led the costly Tea Party debacle which shut down the United States Government for sixteen days; current estimates say the shutdown cost 900,000 jobs. Conservative pundicks say this is exactly the kind of thing that will endear him to the angry dead-ender conservative base, who are determined to vote against their own best interest, even if it means voting for a douche who talks to hotdogs while laying cable.
This month’s national laughingstock just happens to be an adult crybaby.
This sorry-assed excuse for a magazine found its way into my personal space yesterday. Not only was it not funny, but it pissed me off in a way that I have seldom experienced since I stopped abusing certain vile foamy liquids and other assorted borderline ingestibles.
Many of you are too young in this adventure to remember National LAMPOON magazine, let alone one of their most memorable covers, from January 1973. (See it here.) But unlike that cover, this parody did not make me feel sorry for the Boner-as-victim of his own groveling attempts to destroy the American government and … you know what, just forget it.
Forget all the antics of the Republican “party” for a moment. Just answer this question: Why is a sniveling crybaby the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States?
Is this really the best creature we can squeeze out of our gene pool?
Apparently it is, so then, go ahead, Repuglican’ts; do your worst, you catatonic douchebags.
Lost amid the tidal wave of media coverage over the Boston Marathon bombings this week was the destruction of a foundational argument of the Avatars of Austerity, aka “deficit hawks.”
Thanks to a little fact checking and spreadsheet analysis by a U Mass grad student and his associates, they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that key economic data used by the Austerians to justify their slash and burn budget prescriptions is full of shit.
The bogus data is enshrined in a paper by two Harvard economists, Reinhart and Rogoff, frequently cited as Holy Writ by everyone form Erskine-Bowles to Paul Ryan to Fux News. Details to follow, but first, an overview.
Following the collapse of the international financial system during the George W. Bush Administration, deficits worldwide exploded as former tax paying workers were laid off in the tens of millions. Instead of putting them to work building infrastructure and the like, the strategy chosen by FDR during the last Great Depression to re-start the economy and thereby raise government revenues, the uber rich offered their own re-cycled remedy of trickle-down economics, with a twist– tax cuts for them and budget cuts for everyone else.
While the subtext of the Austerians’ campaign to slash government budgets, which overwhelmingly disadvantage the poor and middle class, is obvious: the One Percenters resent having to pay taxes that benefit society as a whole (see Willard Romney’s attack on the 47% as parasites demanding “free stuff”); and while the actual real world results of austerity regimes currently in place in Europe have resulted in deeper economic dislocation and misery — Great Britain is in the middle of a triple dip recession despite deep cuts in vital government institutions like the BBC — one would think that the Austerians would accept reality and admit their anti-Keneysian belief system is wrong.
Fat chance. Depression levels of unemployment in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, accompanied by negative GDP, the contagion effect of austerity is being felt in even healthy exporting countries like Germany, to the extent that even the IMF came out this week against austerity. Despite irrefutable facts, the Austerians remain convinced of the rightness of their crusade. Ignoring Einstein’s definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result — they argue for even greater cuts, and more time for them to work their expected magic.
[T]he Rogoff-Reinhart paper entitled Growth In A Time Of Debt became the intellectual backbone for the austerity movement/plutocrats and their apparatchiks in Washington and elsewhere. The big take away was that a high government debt to GDP ratio – past 90% – would hurt economic growth. Hence, the austerity movement’s central claim that cutting government spending is necessary to restore higher growth levels. And if you are following along, you probably realize why this argument does not even work in its own context. Cutting spending does not eliminate debt – which increases perpetually with interest. Nor is debt itself a reflection of spending levels, debt merely represents borrowing. The government can spend as much as possible and avoid high debt to GDP ratios if taxes are levied to pay for the spending. In fact, the highest growth period in the history of America was during one of its highest tax periods. Neither taxes, debt, nor government spending are, in and of themselves, determinative of economic growth.
Sounds reasonable enough on the surface, assuming that the data they used and its analysis reflect reality. But Houston, we have a problem:
Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst, just used part of his spring semester to shake the intellectual foundation of the global austerity movement.
Herndon became instantly famous in nerdy economics circles this week as the lead author of a recent paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” that took aim at a massively influential study by two Harvard professors named Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Herndon found some hidden errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s data set, then calmly took the entire study out back and slaughtered it.
What Herndon had discovered was that by making a sloppy computing error, Reinhart and Rogoff had forgotten to include a critical piece of data about countries with high debt-to-GDP ratios that would have affected their overall calculations. They had also excluded data from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia — all countries that experienced solid growth during periods of high debt and would thus undercut their thesis that high debt forestalls growth.
Oopsie. Paul Krugman in his Friday column asks the logical, resulting gobsmacking question:
So, did an Excel coding error destroy the economies of the Western world?
Informed of the mathematical mistake that undergirded his and his BFF Alan Simpson’s whole austerity thesis, Democrat deficit hawk Erskine Bowles in essence replied that he didn’t care–he still believes in its viability, the facts be damned.
“I have obviously read the report and have referenced it a number of times,” Bowles said. “I know they had a worksheet error in the report and my understanding is that does make a difference.”
“But what it doesn’t change is the common sense and my own personal experience in both the public and private sector that when any organization has too much debt that is an enormous risk factor and your risks go up then people lending you money will want more money for their money,” Bowles said.
Translation: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
So, Bowles is reduced to playing the “common sense” card so popular among conservatives these days when one of their pet ideologically driven crusades fails an objective analysis of its underlying facts. Sure, there is evidence that debt in excess of 90% of GDP retards economic growth by a measurable percentage. But it doesn’t drive it down anywhere near the level the Austerians maintain, making their Chicken Little The Sky Is Falling routine absurd on its face.
(Reminds me of the cognitive dissonance I used to see operating inside the criminal justice system. As advocacy groups like the Innocence Project has shown, not everyone convicted of a crime is guilty, as post-hoc DNA tests regularly show. You’d think that the original police investigators and prosecutors would eat a little humble pie for being proven wrong, but you’d be wrong. Like chest thumping politicians, they are geniuses at rationalization, maintaining that the victim was guilty for some other reason, because, well, just because. After all, they are professionals, experts who know their stuff.)
Other problems with R&R’s analyses includes the counterfactual case of England, which despite violating the 90% threshold for 19 continuous years, still maintained positive economic growth; and worse, cancelling its influence on the overall data set by giving it equal weight with a single year of severe negative economic growth in New Zealand in the early 1950s. Furthermore, economic conditions change over the decades, and when one analyzes R&R’s data from the beginning of the 21st century forward, the presumed relationship between the 90% level of economic stagnation becomes even more tenuous.
The question now is whether this cold slap of mathematical reality will be enough to end the hysteria of debt obsession that has the Serious People is D.C. so enthralled, and whether the far more critical and economically productive emphasis on job creation is once again the subject of serious policy debate.
Democratic accountability has been sucked out of the nation-state system and deposited into the hands of a planetary bureaucracy of transnational corporations and central bankers. And from their perspective there is no crisis, at least not anymore, just a continued redistribution of wealth up and the necessity of building a police state to protect it. Austerity forever.
As the Master of Disaster W. once said: “Fool me once, shame on, shame on, you. Fool me–you can’t get fooled again!”
Liz Cheney sets the way back machine to 1961 to explain the Grand Obstructionist Party’s response to health care reform
In his NY Times column Monday, Paul Krugman asks a question whose subtext subsumes its substance:
How many Americans will be denied essential health care in the name of freedom?
In case you haven’t noticed, the response to every critical policy issue proffered by the plutocratic funded Teabagger, Libertarian dominated GOP is a non-answer: no can-do, because, you know, freedom. An easy, bumper sticker slogan that appeals to the low information voter and propagandists alike.
Rational gun safety laws? Farmer Fred might have to drive 30 miles to town to record a transfer of his shotgun to his grandson. (Maybe he could combine it with one of his regular town trips, or like, when he has to register the transfer of a vehicle.) Financial regulation? As the banksters are fond of saying: the invisible hand of capitalism is regulator enough, thank you very much. Pollution controls? That costs jobs and all the freedom that goes with ’em. Immigration reform? Employers should be free to hire whomever they want, at whatever pay the market will bear. That’s the free market, baby.
Krugman drills down on the healthcare issue:
“I’m referring, of course, to the question of how many Republican governors will reject the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of Obamacare. What does that have to do with freedom? In reality, nothing. But when it comes to politics, it’s a different story.
It goes without saying that Republicans oppose any expansion of programs that help the less fortunate — along with tax cuts for the wealthy, such opposition is pretty much what defines modern conservatism. But they seem to be having more trouble than in the past defending their opposition without simply coming across as big meanies.
Specifically, the time-honored practice of attacking beneficiaries of government programs as undeserving malingerers doesn’t play the way it used to. When Ronald Reagan spoke about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, it resonated with many voters. When Mitt Romney was caught on tape sneering at the 47 percent, not so much.
There is, however, an alternative. From the enthusiastic reception American conservatives gave Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” to Reagan, to the governors now standing in the way of Medicaid expansion, the U.S. right has sought to portray its position not as a matter of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, but as a courageous defense of freedom.”
Yup, the Romney Revelation required a reboot— blaming the victim can only take you so far, especially when the victims are so close at hand. So, time to step into the Cheney time machine to make old things appear new again.
“Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) “If you and I don’t do this,” Reagan declared, “then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” What you might not guess from the lofty language is that “this” — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.”
So, it’s back to the future, where the right wing antediluvians think they can pour old wine into new wine skins. Their conception of freedom is truncated into the freedom from formulation— freedom from government, which is to say, society as a whole. The other formulation of freedom, freedom to, was long ago perverted into license— license to do whatever the hell somebody with means wants, ignoring the generations of collective effort that made their self-centered notions of freedom possible.
When but a sophomore in high school, I had the good fortune to encounter the writings of the noted psychologist, Erich Fromm, who made clear to me the nuanced differences between freedom from and freedom to. (As a horny teenager, I picked up his classic The Art of Loving, thinking it was a sex manual of some sort, but got hooked instead on his philosophical approach to life.) As long as we are doing a little time traveling, let’s go back another twenty years, to the publication of Fromm’s Escape From Freedom in 1941 (during the height of The Third Reich). From the WikiP entry:
Fromm distinguishes between ‘freedom from’ (negative freedom) and ‘freedom to’ (positive freedom). The former refers to emancipation from restrictions such as social conventions placed on individuals by other people or institutions. This is the kind of freedom typified by the Existentialism of Sartre, and has often been fought for historically, but according to Fromm, on its own it can be a destructive force unless accompanied by a creative element, ‘freedom to’ the use of freedom to employ spontaneously the total integrated personality in creative acts. This, he argues, necessarily implies a true connectedness with others that goes beyond the superficial bonds of conventional social intercourse: “…in the spontaneous realization of the self, man unites himself anew with the world…”
A world unobtainable to the selfish and the cruel. What else explains their desire to destroy a society which they reject, from which they have chosen to ex-communicate themselves? Better its destruction than a constant reminder of their own dysfunction.
WikiP concludes its review with this (italic emphasis mine):
Fromm examines democracy and freedom. Modern democracy and the industrialised nation are models he praises but it is stressed that the kind of external freedom provided by this kind of society can never be utilised to the full without an equivalent inner freedom. Fromm suggests that though we are free from obvious authoritarian influence, we are still dominated in our thinking and behaviour by ideas of ‘common sense’, the advice of experts and the influence of advertising. The way to become truly free in an individual sense is to become spontaneous in our self-expression and behaviour and respond truthfully to our genuine feelings. This is crystallised in his existential statement “there is only one meaning of life: the act of living it“. Fromm counters suggestions that this might lead to social chaos by claiming that being truly in touch with our humanity is to be truly in touch with the needs of those with whom we share the world. This is the meaning of a truly social democracy and the realisation of the positive ‘freedom to’ that arises when people escape the malign influence of totalising political orders.
I heard Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) play the “common sense” card yesterday, trying to explain his support for the watered down gun safety agreement he reached with his Democratic counterpart, Joe Manchin (D-W.VA). “Common sense” is the mantra conservatives are using these days to oppose government regulation of any sort. “The advice of experts” is what fuels the whole deferential beltway pundit mentality. And the advertising industry is exactly the foundation of the modern day political propaganda machine.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Incorrect order from bored shitless to arrogant fuck Misanthropic Sociopaths: Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, Chevron CEO John Watson, Shell President Marvin Odum, Conoco-Phillips CEO Jim Mulva, BP America Chairman Lamar McKay.
